U.S. filmmaker Alexander Payne (Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, The Holdovers) is joining Lucy Liu, Emma Thompson, and Jackie Chan as honorees at this year’s 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival. Payne will receive the Swiss fest’s Honorary Leopard, the Pardo d’Onore, presented by Manor, on Friday, Aug. 15.
He will also present his films The Descendants (2011) and Nebraska (2013), as well as participate in a public discussion with the festival’s audience and fans.
“The distinctive voice behind a slate of dryly funny modern classics, writer-director Alexander Payne has secured his place on the short list of filmmakers whose work can be said to define American cinema in the 21st century,” Locarno said. “His films have collectively won three Academy Awards, three BAFTAs, and eight Golden Globes in various categories, including for their memorable performances, and exemplify the pleasures of mid-budget filmmaking for grown-ups – a besieged art form ever in need of defense.”
Born in Nebraska in 1961, Payne studied filmmaking at UCLA, where his student work drew attention from Hollywood. By 1996, he had written and directed the comedy Citizen Ruth (1996), starring Laura Dern, which premiered at Sundance. “From there, Payne went on to realize a remarkable series of seven more feature films, with each distinguished by their elegant construction, biting humor, and extraordinary tragicomic performances from an astounding range of revered actors,” Locarno highlighted.
Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival, lauded Payne as “an erudite auteur with an encyclopedic cinephile knowledge” and an “author of a unique filmography in which he has always addressed the complexities of the human condition with a smile.”
He continued: “Gifted with an unerring sense for the bittersweet facets of human comedy, he is a filmmaker with sensibilities at once exquisitely classical and modern. An impeccable director of actors who has worked with such names as Jack Nicholson, George Clooney, Reese Witherspoon, Laura Dern, Matt Damon, Bruce Dern, and Paul Giamatti, in Payne we find a knowledge of the savoir-faire of Hollywood cinema, its poetry, and its uniqueness.”
The Pardo d’Onore has been handed out since 2017. Previous recipients include Manoel de Oliveira, Bernardo Bertolucci, Ken Loach, Jean-Luc Godard, Abbas Kiarostami, Terry Gilliam, Alexander Sokurov, William Friedkin, Alain Tanner, Jia Zhang-ke, Leos Carax, Werner Herzog, Agnès Varda, Michael Cimino, Marco Bellocchio, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jean-Marie Straub, Todd Haynes, Bruno Dumont, John Waters, John Landis, Kelly Reichardt, Harmony Korine, and Jane Campion.
The 78th edition of the Locarno Film Festival will take place Aug. 6-16.
